Rethinking Domestic Violence The Social Work and
Probation Response - 1st Edition
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medipdf.com/product/rethinking-domestic-violence-the-social-work-and-pro
bation-response-1st-edition/
Click Download Now
To my sister,
Lesley,
with love
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 The terms of the debate 3
The record of social work 6
Terminology 8
Other forms of abuse in intimate relationships 11
Conclusions 17
2 What do we know about domestic violence? 19
What is domestic abuse? 19
Where does abuse take place? 26
When did abuse start? 29
How widespread is domestic abuse? 30
Why does it happen? The myths (and facts) of causation 36
Theories about men 37
Theories about women 45
Conclusion 63
3 Social work as part of the problem 65
The research evidence 66
The way forward 81
4 Developing good practice in social services departments 82
Best practice 83
Duty work 92
Child protection and child welfare 95
Conclusion 106
5 Responses to domestic abuse in health and adult care settings 107
Primary health care settings 110
Mental health 116
Hospital settings 124
viii Contents
Work with older women 131
Women with physical disabilities and/or learning difficulties 133
Conclusion 138
6 The needs of children living with domestic abuse 139
The impact on children 141
Links with child abuse 144
Work with children in refuges 153
Direct work with and for children 159
Conclusion 167
7 Social work and probation practice with families 169
Family work and violence: a fundamental change of perspective 170
Family court welfare work 185
Child care work, families and the courts 191
Conclusion 201
8 The probation service and domestic violence 203
Current attitudes 203
The probation role with women 206
Work with men 210
Supervision 214
Throughcare and aftercare 216
Ways forward: action on a service-wide level 219
Conclusion 220
9 The men who abuse: what kind of intervention in groups? 222
The current British context 223
Methodology and philosophy 225
Accountability to women’s safety, perspectives and priorities 235
Efficacy 242
Resourcing 245
Conclusion 247
10 Working together for change: the wider context and the
empowerment of women 249
Inter-agency forums 250
Public education 259
The overall aim: the empowerment of women 266
Conclusion 276
Notes 278
References 280
Name index 303
General index 309
Preface
Researching and writing this book has not been easy. It is harrowing to be
immersed in graphic accounts of physical and sexual assaults and of emotional
degradation over a long period of time, as all those living and working with
these realities know. Like other authors before me (see Kelly, 1988b, pp.15–19
for a powerful and intelligent account of all that is involved), I have been put
in touch with painful memories—and I have been unable to avoid at every
turn questioning all the male and female constituents of the relationships and
assumptions, as well as the social backcloth, of my daily life. I could not have
survived without the strength of the women’s networks and the female
academic community of which I count myself privileged to be a part. I emerge
more determined to add my small influence to all those who survive—and
work to help others survive—the harms inflicted in an abusive society.
The acknowledgement in this book that social workers have traditionally
been ‘part of the problem’ for women experiencing abuse is also chastening
for me, as I am a social worker by training and experience and now a social
work educator and writer. Yet this book is certainly not intended as another
‘social work bashing’ tome. My continued involvement with the profession
rests on the belief that we are one of the best hopes for the enlightened
recognition of human resourcefulness and potential for change. Women living
with abuse are not hopeless victims and men inflicting it are not individual
monsters for whom the only solution is to be locked up for ever and the key
thrown away. The reality is at once more hopeful—because people can
change (given a conjunction of justice, confrontation, support and
motivation)—and more difficult, because the root of the problems is
embedded deep in our society and involves all of us in confronting painful
truths about our lives and ourselves. Social workers have never fought shy of
such recognition, however. All our work demands that we engage with
complex social problems mirrored in personal vulnerabilities. At our best, we
seek to learn about the intricacies of such issues so that we can be better
equipped to empower people to tackle them. It is high time we turned this
best practice in the direction of domestic violence and its impact on women
and children. This is the aim that underscores this book.
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank all those who have taken considerable time and
trouble to share ideas and read drafts; the University of Durham, for
research leave; the National Children’s Bureau, for a Mia Kellmer Pringle
Fellowship which funded a trip to the USA and Canada to study services
for child witnesses of woman abuse; John, for all the sacrifices made for
the sake of this book; and the media, for both competent and incompetent
reporting of women’s experiences which enraged me afresh every day and
kept me to the task.
In time honoured fashion, enormous help came from all the above but
errors and inadequacies are mine.
Introduction
Effective action in any social sphere is impossible without an adequate
understanding of the nature and extent of the problem. Chapter 1 analyses
the terminology of domestic abuse and the record of social work in this
field, whilst firmly establishing the fact that the greatest amount of violence
is inflicted by men on women. Gay and lesbian relationships are referred to,
but the main concentration is on abuse within heterosexual relationships.
Chapter 2 explores information on the incidence and theories of the
causation of domestic violence. In so doing, it exposes common myths—that
drink causes domestic violence, that women seek or provoke the violence,
and so on—which have percolated into social work practice. It seeks to
replace the myths with the actual stories of women’s lived experience. The
common themes that emerge—for example that men must take responsibility
for their abusive behaviour and that women must be heard, believed and
empowered—constitute the strongest evidence on which to base appropriate
professional intervention. Social workers need, too, to understand the
complexities of women’s attempts to escape: the use by male partners of all
forms of abuse to prevent this; the interaction between the emotional impact
of the abuse and the difficulty of negotiating the maze of legal and welfare
services; above all, the crucial need for advocacy, self-help and support
services to empower women through this process on their own terms.
Chapter 3 examines research into social work involvement in domestic
violence in the past and why the profession has had such a bad image in the
literature. There has been shown to be widescale neglect of the issue by
practitioners. The most common traditional response, that of ‘keeping the
family together’, may have been replaced by insisting that the woman goes
into a refuge or seeks an injunction—but with no less a failure to support
her in her own perceptions and choices in a highly dangerous situation, and
no less a tendency to redefine cases as ‘child protection’ as if women
subjected to abuse were not themselves also preoccupied with protecting
their children. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 show that this is slowly beginning to
change, with good practice across some whole social services departments
2 Introduction
(or equivalent around the UK) and in some specialist settings including duty
teams, child care work, and health and community care contexts. This is
contrasted in Chapter 7 with a widespread failure by social workers and
probation officers to recognise that working with a couple or family together
is unsafe, though policy covering probation practice in family court welfare
work is giving a lead. Chapters 8 and 9 move the focus to the remainder of
probation practice, in general workloads, and in special programmes for
abusers.
The book closes by advocating a woman-centred, crime preventive and
public education perspective. Core responses that can be of assistance in
developing a new approach are identified, with much hope for the future
resting on the need for interlinked services to give women choices and to
help them and their children to be safe. Though organisational obstacles to
confronting male power and empowering women remain strong, practitioners
can find alliances and trends for positive change—inceasingly through inter-
agency forums (Hague et al., 1995)—and equip themselves with the
necessary analysis and skills to be part of the solution rather than part of the
problem.
Chapter 1
The terms of the debate
In recent years there has been a growing intolerance in Britain of the abuse by
men of their wives, girlfriends, partners and ex-partners. This can be measured
by increased media coverage as well as by changes in policing policy to
recognise much of the abuse as criminal behaviour, a rise in the number of
domestic violence inter-agency forums intended to co-ordinate practical
responses, and belated Government attention—though, at the present time, the
latter has yet to be backed up by serious resourcing or legislative change.
These developments have been surprisingly slow to come, as a result of
which, although Britain began to originate a nationwide refuge movement as
early as 1972 (Dobash and Dobash, 1992, pp.63–7), we currently lag behind
parts of the USA, Canada and Australia in giving women and children real
hope for safety through adequate public funding of services. The intentions
and philosophy of the early feminist campaigners have held firm (pp.87–90),
despite public neglect, and the results are there to be turned to: by women
experiencing abuse for life-saving assistance, and by statutory professionals for
guidance and example. The four Women’s Aid federations of England,
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland hold the nation’s expertise on men’s
abuse of women. They are well-established voluntary organisations which
undertake campaigning and offer support to independent, collectively run local
refuges1 and related services which conceptualise their committed work for
women’s safety within broader goals of personal and social empowerment.
There are no bureaucratised refuges run by or employing professional social
workers or psychologists in this network as one finds in North America;
women living in Women’s Aid refuges make their own decisions, continue to
look after their own families, and are supported by workers, still normally in
collective structures, who have often been through similar experiences
themselves. This keeps UK refuges highly woman-centred.
Women’s organisations in Britain, in a second wave of feminism with
roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have fought for over
twenty years for a national funding base for refuges, for effective rehousing
policies, economic and social support for women forced to leave their
4 Rethinking Domestic Violence
homes, legislative protection, and effective law enforcement. None of these
battles has yet been fully won. It has always been an uphill struggle to get
women’s danger and distress taken seriously. In particular, Government has
lacked or resisted a comprehensive understanding of the problem that could
underpin action across a range of fronts. The Children Act of 1989
(implemented in 1991) makes no mention of domestic violence, for example,
yet contact orders made under the Act (see Chapter 7, this volume) can
involve men being given details of their ex-partners’ whereabouts.
Furthermore, the lack of comprehensive national planning means that gains
for women in one area are frequently accompanied by losses in another.
Recent research by Malos and Hague (1993), for instance, indicates that
proposed improvements in legislation on homelessness have been
accompanied by cutbacks in funding for local government housing
departments that make rehousing harder than ever. There is also an interplay
(or perhaps a vacuum) between agency responses that is counterproductive
for women. Many housing departments now expect women to obtain
injunctions through the courts, for example (ibid., pp.36–7).
In the mid-1990s, however, Britain does at last appear to be in the midst
of a wave of serious attention to the issues at national level,2 however
sceptical one may remain about the political motivation underlying some of
the moves or the extent of real change they have achieved (Morley, 1993).
The police were amongst the first public bodies to set the trend towards
change. In 1987, the Metropolitan Police introduced a force order on
domestic violence, advising all officers to utilise their existing powers of
arrest, since ‘an assault which occurs within the home is as much a criminal
act as one which may occur in the street’, followed in 1990 by a set of best
practice guidelines. The Home Office (Circular 60/1990) and Scottish Office
advised similar improvements for the whole of Britain, based on ‘showing
the victim that she is entitled to, and will receive, society’s protection and
support [by always considering t]he arrest and detention of an alleged
assailant’. Most local police forces (now police services) responded, and the
publicity received by such moves, together with pressure on women to report
assaults (see Chapter 10, this volume, on public education campaigns aimed
at women), increased the numbers of women calling the police and the
number of assaults recorded as crimes (see Chapter 2, this volume). Other
positive measures mooted in the Home Office Circular that have been widely
implemented are police involvement in inter-agency forums, and the
establishment of designated Domestic Violence Units (DVUs) or of specialist
units combining responses to domestic violence and child sexual abuse.
Informal feedback from Women’s Aid does seem to reflect some overall
improvement in police responses to women reporting abuse, though
remaining problems include inconsistencies between individual officers and
continuing feelings on the part of many Black3 women that the police use
domestic violence to keep them and their communities under surveillance
The terms of the debate 5
(Mama, 1993, p.135). Prosecution of abusive men, and for sufficiently
serious offences, remains difficult to achieve (e.g. Kennedy, 1992, pp.84–5),
and pressure on the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (or equivalent;
Procurators Fiscal in Scotland) in this regard continues. Current concerns are
that charges are more, rather than less, often being reduced to common
assault; that women’s behaviour is too often seen as an aggravating factor,
and men’s apparent contrition as a mitigating factor in the situation; and that
arrests, charges and imprisonment have all failed to increase as one might
have expected (Glass, 1995) despite the changes in policing policy.
The police have not been alone in giving domestic violence greater
prominence and, gradually it has come to public attention. Three Appeal
Court decisions in 1992, for example, which resulted in the release of
women imprisoned for killing violent partners, gained widespread media
coverage.
Nineteen ninety-two, in fact, was arguably the pivotal year. It also saw the
beginning of inter-ministerial co-operation administered by the Home Office
(House of Commons, 1992a, para. 132; see Chapter 10, this volume), and
the commencement of a Home Affairs Committee enquiry (which reported in
House of Commons, 1992a and 1992b) focusing largely on policing and
civil remedies. Lest we were becoming too confident in the likelihood of the
establishment setting the pace, however, the Government’s reply to the Home
Affairs Committee report (Home Department et al., 1993) was cautious and
disappointing. But, before the end of 1992, the issue had become
unstoppable. A national inter-agency working party from a voluntary
organisation had issued a much cited report which set the probation service,
amongst others, on the path towards change (Victim Support, 1992), and
Southall Black Sisters—the group that campaigned for the release of Kiranjit
Ahluwalia, one of the women driven to kill her abusive husband—had
achieved their aim and been awarded a civil liberties prize by a national
charity. The issue of women who kill their abusers later went on to occupy a
major storyline in a soap opera (Channel 4’s Brookside) for several
months—culminating in a trial and a not untypical life sentence for the
fictional wife in May 1995—and was picked up throughout the media. All
these developments, over a period of several years, combined to rekindle
general interest in the issue of domestic violence in national news and
current affairs reporting and were accompanied, at local level, by a growing
interest in establishing multi-agency forums to co-ordinate existing statutory
and voluntary responses (see Chapter 10) and to identify what else needed to
be done.
Most recently, the Labour Party’s (1995) ‘Peace at Home’ initiative
(which proposes a national strategy on domestic and sexual violence,
including strengthened legislation, a funding framework for refuges,
improved police practice and housing provision, and more effective public
education) has placed domestic abuse more firmly on the national political
6 Rethinking Domestic Violence
map. In Europe, Ministerial conferences have drawn up plans of action to
combat violence against women. Globally, the Beijing World Conference on
Women in 1995, also included this matter as a critical area of concern, with
the abuse of women increasingly now being seen around the world as an
issue of basic human rights (Bunch and Carrillo, 1992).
As 1995 and 1996 have seen the release from prison of Emma
Humphreys (following an appeal) and Sara Thornton (after a retrial led to
a conviction for manslaughter rather than murder), it does seem that the
tide of popular opinion may be turning towards justice for women who
experience abuse, even those who kill as a result. Certainly, the media are
becoming more willing to report cases from the perspective of the domestic
violence involved, rather than glossing over this. There is still a long way
to go, however, both in achieving changes in the law so that it is less
punitive towards women (making manslaughter pleas and provocation
defences easier, lessening the emphasis on women’s mental health and
ending mandatory life sentences for murder) and in switching the focus
from women who kill to the far larger number of women who are
themselves killed.
THE RECORD OF SOCIAL WORK
Social work has not been at the forefront of any of the positive moves for
change, though probation and social services are represented on most of
the local inter-agency forums which are springing up. Probation services
have begun to respond to the need to work with abusive men through
special programmes (see Chapter 9, this volume), but neither probation
officers nor social workers have routinely re-examined their workloads to
consider how they might use their role and influence to hold abusive men
to account for their actions in other ways or—crucially—to help women
achieve safety and a greater possibility of caring for their children as they
would wish. Furthermore, though probation has a national position
statement (Association of Chief Officers of Probation [ACOP], 1992, under
revision in 1996), only relatively few local probation services, social
services departments, and social-work based voluntary organisations have
tackled the issue at a policy level, leaving it to individual practitioners to
be more or less concerned—as their personal awareness, their life
experience, or their training dictate.
Social workers and social work agencies urgently need to learn more
about domestic violence, to understand its seriousness, and to rethink their
typical responses in order to achieve greater consistency and a more helpful
approach. They need to do this in a context that perceives power and control
as exercised not only through gender oppression but also through racism,
homophobia and heterosexism, as well as unequal treatment on the grounds
The terms of the debate 7
of class, disability and age. At the same time, they need to find ways to
project a more positive image—so that women subjected to abuse do not
simply avoid statutory help for fear of having their children taken into care,
their ex-partners enabled to recommence their harassment, or their own
experiences discounted.
Social workers and probation officers come into contact with very
large numbers of abused women and abusive men, and arguably they are
in a better position than many other professionals to take constructive
action because they are trained to look for concealed problems, to
understand issues in a wider social context, to offer interpersonal support
or challenge to achieve personal change over time, and to harness a range
of forms of practical and emotional help. Too often, they fail to use the
opportunities available to them to identify or respond adequately to
women experiencing abuse or to confront abusive men. At the same time,
the role of the social worker remains blurred—is it to promote family
life, to protect children, to help women and children reach safety or, if a
little of all of these, then where is the cut-off point and who decides?
Contact with abusive fathers is just one area in which these possible roles
can come into conflict. Probation officers, too, are being required to be
more concerned with the safety and interests of the victims of crime and
the nature of offending behaviour but without effective guidance as to
their precise role in relation to abuse. Both groups, social workers and
probation officers, have commented to researchers and at conferences that
they lack skill and confidence in this area of work owing to lack of
essential knowledge (see Chapter 3). They need to know what research
can tell us about the realities and causes of abuse, what statutory and
community-based resources provide the most appropriate answers,
whether particular ways of intervening may increase the dangers and
what their own involvement should be. Policy makers need to support
their staff with adequate training, resources and information, clear
guidelines, and systematic co-operation with other agencies right across
the statutory health and welfare, criminal justice, and independent sectors.
Where these improvements have been made, there has been a noticeable
increase in attempts to tackle men’s abuse of women consistently and
effectively.
This book will attempt to engage with all these issues and to help
practitioners meet their practical and moral responsibilities in ways which put
women and their children at less risk and leave abusive men less likely to
continue inflicting harm. It is addressed to all social workers, care managers,
probation officers and related professionals, as well as to their managers and
those who make the policies and laws that they implement. The term ‘social
services’ will be used to embrace social services departments in England and
Wales, social work departments in Scotland, and health and social services
boards or trusts in Northern Ireland. The text is seen as relevant, not only in
